November 11, 2016: Friday

I had insomnia last night and did not sleep at all. So early this morning I set to working and did some system updates while it was in the wee hours of the morning.  Might as well take advantage of the fact that I was awake all evening.

It’s Friday.  No news.  Ready for the weekend and some time to ingest all that is going on this week.

November 10, 2016: Still Sad Around Here

Thursday.  Pretty slow day, no news from the home front to report.  Still we are just dealing with the emotional and planning impacts of the election results.  Everyone is still very hopeful that the electoral college will overturn things, but we don’t have much faith in that, they have never done it before.  They are basically just a rubber stamp process.

This whole affair has made it a lot easier to talk Dominica into being out of the country far more than we had planned on previously, however now we are talking about contingency plans in case things go really badly in the US and what if we are stuck having to not return to the US for a long time in case it goes into martial law or whatever.  That might sound extreme, but things have already happened that we did not think were really possible and we have to be ready for anything to happen now.  There is every possibility that things will be fine, but every possibility that we are looking at a worst case scenario, too.  We need contingency plans, we have little kids to think about.

So that has been taking up our time.  Not much else to tell about today.

November 9, 2016: National Shame Day

Today is a very, very depressing day.  We all feel terrible.  At least Dominica and I (and the kids) know that we are leaving the country before all of this takes place officially, but we are going to be embarking on a new degree of the “International Trump Apology Tour” when we head out for Europe again in January.  If we thought that it was bad and embarrassing before, this is going to be so much worse.  Now we have to apologize for the entire country.  [Edit: In January we were out of the country for one entire hour before having someone confront us about the situation!]

Our entire day was pretty much taken up by political discussions, crying (not kidding) and trying to figure out what this all means for the real future and how it affects our life plans.  I always felt that it was likely that Trump was going to win, however it happened, so this is not coming as a shock to me in the way that it seems to be to so many people around me who really did not believe that he could possibly win the election.  So I am much more mentally and emotionally prepared for it all.  This is going to be a rough four years, and I have no feeling that this will end at four years (or eight) and totally expect that in January we will have the final peaceful transition of power in American history.  I truly believe that we just witnessed Gaius Julius crossing the Rubicon and this is the end of the republic in America.  Not that that is all a bad thing, the Republican form has proven to be very, very bad and democracy clearly has not worked in a country of this size.  But this is not how it should have been torn down.